Ode on a Line by Marie Howe
by Michelle Bitting
If I got on my knees, might I lift my life as a turtle
carries her home?
And what would I see there
beneath the mud
of flooded deserts, of dirty
runes and pages pressed with dust
to passing hours? So long I looked
for severed diadems, meaning
I really was obsessed—
a child hunting the hills
haunting my house, rocks with lapidary
yolks found secreted, lithic
eggs I was told when cleaved
revealed a violent shimmering.
I wanted it more than gold, more
than lapis, quartz or the Tongvan
honed obsidian, pitch
arrows if you’re lucky
to recover anything intact—still—
the boys entranced by weaponry and tools.
As I was, a fortshaper, a brush brute
clearing the past in service of rooms
for burnt imaginings, bushels
of them, my floors wept clean—no
leaves or poison left—just talking mats
of welcoming spiders, yucca, sage.
Step on it I said, imagining palaces,
their crystal hiddenness, a granite
heart I could split and lift
above like Atlas. I'm on my knees
dissolving what remains now—
stones to glitter, to semiprecious
pools, soft and luminous
as water, as the moons of my
children’s faces, humorous
as when I squeezed
their slippery eggs into the earth
under this shell and its crumbling
cosmos, under worlds where I write this,
where I will bury myself singing.
carries her home?
And what would I see there
beneath the mud
of flooded deserts, of dirty
runes and pages pressed with dust
to passing hours? So long I looked
for severed diadems, meaning
I really was obsessed—
a child hunting the hills
haunting my house, rocks with lapidary
yolks found secreted, lithic
eggs I was told when cleaved
revealed a violent shimmering.
I wanted it more than gold, more
than lapis, quartz or the Tongvan
honed obsidian, pitch
arrows if you’re lucky
to recover anything intact—still—
the boys entranced by weaponry and tools.
As I was, a fortshaper, a brush brute
clearing the past in service of rooms
for burnt imaginings, bushels
of them, my floors wept clean—no
leaves or poison left—just talking mats
of welcoming spiders, yucca, sage.
Step on it I said, imagining palaces,
their crystal hiddenness, a granite
heart I could split and lift
above like Atlas. I'm on my knees
dissolving what remains now—
stones to glitter, to semiprecious
pools, soft and luminous
as water, as the moons of my
children’s faces, humorous
as when I squeezed
their slippery eggs into the earth
under this shell and its crumbling
cosmos, under worlds where I write this,
where I will bury myself singing.
Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2023 CRAFT Character Sketch Challenge, the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, the 2021 Fish Poetry Contest judged by Billy Collins, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize and 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. She won Quarter After Eight’s 2018 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruminate Magazine, 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests. She is the author of five poetry collections, Good Friday Kiss, winner of the inaugural De Novo First Book Award; Notes to the Beloved, which won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award; The Couple Who Fell to Earth; Broken Kingdom, winner of the 2018 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and recently named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist is forthcoming in 2024. Bitting is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University. https://www.michellebitting.com/